All posts tagged Salesforce

Google executive Susan Wojcicki has joined the board of Salesforce.com, bringing over a decade of online advertising experience to an enterprise software firm that’s increasingly focused on helping customers manage their marketing efforts.

Wojcicki, who runs Google’s YouTube division, is Salesforce’s 11th director and the second woman on the board, joining Robin Washington, CFO of biotech company Gilead Sciences. Read More »

The world’s biggest software expo ended Thursday night–though conference may not be the right word.

Dreamforce 2014 was also equal parts luau, spring break, rock festival, food drive, and TEDx. With over 145,000 registered visitors from more than 90 countries, plus another 5 million watching the videostream, the event spilled out of San Francisco’s Moscone Center into adjacent streets and a half dozen nearby hotels, practically shutting down a portion of downtown San Francisco for four days.

But the sprawl wasn’t merely physical. Staged by Salesforce, which offers business software as a service on the Web, the annual event straddled the disparate worlds of business, entertainment, politics, philanthropy, and what have come to be known as big ideas. Dreamforce is emblematic of the fact that technology is increasingly embedded in global culture at large, and the theory that technology companies—even makers of business software–can implant themselves in users’ lives by allying themselves with powers far afield of software, hardware, and their markets as they are usually conceived. Read More »

Keith Block has a plan for the next wave of multibillion-dollar growth at Salesforce.com, which delivers online business software as a service–and it involves running roughshod over one of the biggest software companies in the world.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff hired Block as president and vice chairman just over a year ago, decades after the two men worked together at Oracle. Since then, Block said, he has spent the bulk of his time honing a plan to boost Salesforce’s annual revenue to $20 billion from what analysts estimate will be $5.4 billion this fiscal year. Read More »

A longstanding headache for companies has been how difficult it is to find and analyze corporate data regardless of where it’s located—in Excel spreadsheets, back-end applications, the cloud and so on.

Called business intelligence and analytics, this market is now being pursued by several big technology companies, including International Business Machines Corp. and Oracle Corp., in addition to several smaller ones. Salesforce.com Inc. is expected to announce something at its Dreamforce conference next week.

Now two of these contenders—SAP AG and Birst Inc., which has raised about $64 million from investors—have joined forces, announcing a partnership that will provide analytics software from Birst on the fast in-memory database called SAP HANA. Read More »

The billionaire head of Salesforce.com doesn’t have anything personal against the co-founder of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. But he adamantly disagrees with Perkins’ recent defense of the tech elite.

In an interview with WSJD on Tuesday at his office, Benioff says he and other entrepreneurs have to do more individually and together to give back to the community and push for reform in the city. Read More »

Twitter has displaced Facebook as the top tech employer, according to a new best-workplace list from Glassdoor, a website where employees rank their companies and employers list jobs. Tech companies occupy seven of the top 10 spots on the 2014 edition of the site’s list.

Making its debut in the rankings, Twitter is listed as the second-best place to work in the U.S. Rival social networks LinkedIn and Facebook are ranked fourth and fifth respectively; in the prior rankings, Facebook was first. Software makers Guidewire and Interactive Intelligence placed sixth and seventh, and Google landed at eighth. Orbitz Worldwide, the online travel services company, nabbed the ninth slot. Read More »

Salesforce.com triggered a lot of buzz on Twitter Monday with its new plan for a technology platform, the centerpiece of a glitzy San Francisco conference. But the significance of the new offering is also generating considerable debate.

The company is styling what it calls Salesforce1 as a way to pull together two pillars–mobile devices, with all their associated apps, and the “Internet Of Things”–a ubiquitous new buzz phrase for all manner of other connected devices and sensors. Both can generate a flood of data about customers that could play a big role in sales and marketing, Salesforce.com’s speciality. Read More »

Salesforce.com is best known for software that helps salespeople keep tabs on customers and prospects. This week, Salesforce’s biggest sales job is itself.

The company Monday kicks off a 120,000-attendee conference called Dreamforce, during which Salesforce plans to pitch itself as a “platform,” an industry term for providing a canvas on which companies can create their own software. The programs would typically run on Salesforce’s computers, freeing business owners from owning and maintaining their own computing infrastructure. Read More »

Marc Benioff hasn’t particularly cared for the posthumous portrayals of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, who the Salesforce.com CEO has called a prophet.

“I think that some of the problems with the books that have come out and the movies is this: they do not honor the spiritual aspect of his personality–and that really bugs me,” said Benioff on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco on Tuesday.

Benioff said that the commercial depiction of Jobs, who passed away in 2011, has focused too much on the outrageous aspects of his personality while overlooking the reasons why he was such a force in the industry. Read More »